I have two laptops, both with Python 2.5 installed. One is XP where I have limited permissions, the others is a Win 7 platform where I have full admin rights. I have code similar to the tutorial example, eg,

This code works perfectly on my Win 7 full admin rights laptop, but on my laptop where I have limited permissions, testing the above code gives me zero command line options. Would my windows permissions be causing this issue? I thought I'd tested this on that laptop successfully in the past when I also had admin rights, so the permissions is the only thing I can think of that would cause it to fail. Has anyone run into this?

Since you are using the tutorial code it looks like you are trying to learn a way to parse command line arguments (maybe as part of some larger project). Consider using optparse or argparse instead of getopt. In Python 2.5 optparse is part of the standard library. Argparse is the preferred method in 2.7 and up, but if you want to use it in 2.5 then you'd need to download it because it's not in 2.5's standard library. Either of these other libraries will make life easier for you because you don't have to parse arguments by hand as with getopt, and learning them would be far more useful to you because getopt is unused in modern code.

This does a reasonable job of explaining the progression from getopt to optparse to argparse:

You're correct in that I have a program I wrote years ago that would either take command line args or would pop up a dialog. I normally use the dialog, but was surprised recently when the code ignored my command line args and would continue to popup the dialog. That's when I went to the tutorial code just as a simplified test case as it does pretty much what my code is doing with respect to the command line parsing, and when I run it on my Win 7 full admin rights laptop, I get the same results as you did ...

OS differences aside, given I'm sure the command line was working in the past on the failing laptop, is that I now no longer have admin rights. Of course, their could have been other things with the OS that could have changed without my knowing with automated updates happening, etc.